To increase production plant efficiency, cigarette manufacturers require increasingly high-output automatic machines, in particular, cigarette manufacturing and packing machines.
At present, two solutions are adopted to increase the output of cigarette packing machines: increase operating speed, or double the operating members to process the cigarettes on two side by side lines; both of which involve considerable expenditure by calling for major structural alterations to known packing machines.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,085,229 discloses an automatic machine comprising at least an operating device located along a production line for producing articles and a control unit for controlling the operating device in order to obtain a relatively high production rate without substantial loss of quality of the articles produced. The operating device has an adjustable work member, which can be set to a number of different operating configurations to adjust, to a greater or lesser degree, the way in which it interacts with the processing of the articles. A change of the operating configuration of the work member results in a change of one of the characteristics of the articles.
The machine disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,085,229, though relatively reliable, does not allow relatively easy and fast changes of the operating configuration of the work member.